How far are you willing to go to watch an India vs Pakistan World Cup match? Are you ready to cough up INR 1.84 crore? Because that's how high the ticket prices have become for the marquee clash at the ICC T20 World Cup 2024 on June 9. (Cricket News)
Tickets for India's matches against Pakistan in New York and versus Canada in Florida (on June 15) have been sold out. They are now available at well over double their original prices, with some of them going as high as INR 1.84 crore ($222,500) on resale platforms like SeatGeek and StubHub.
The official ticket sale facilitated by the International Cricket Council (ICC) had the match tickets priced at INR 497 ($6), with the costliest ticket for premium seats in the much-awaited India vs Pakistan match-up pegged at INR 33,148 ($400) sans taxes. ICC had stated in its directive that "no additional fees will be imposed beyond the specified taxes".
But the resale websites seem to be painting a different picture. The aforementioned VIP tickets are being sold at around INR 33.15 lakh ($40,000). Add the platform fee, and the total comes up to INR 41.44 lakh. On StubHub, the least-priced ticket for the Indo-Pakistan game is INR 1.04 lakh, while on SeatGeek, the costliest ticket for the match is priced at $222,500, including the platform fee.
This astronomical figure is more than three times that witnessed in the 2023 ODI World Cup, where the highest-priced ticket for India's encounter against Pakistan was pegged at around INR 56 lakh in the secondary market. The tickets were sold on Viagogo, which claims to be the “world’s largest source of live entertainment tickets".
Contrast the INR 1.84 crore figure with mega events in other popular sports, and it will still come up trumps. The average ticket for World Series - Major League Baseball's annual championship series - is priced at close to $1,100 (INR 9.1 lakh) and the courtside seats for the NBA Finals fetched a price of about $24,000 (INR 19.9 lakh).
The official ticket sales for the ICC T20 World Cup 2024 began with a seven-day public ballot from February 1-7, 2024. Following the completion of the ballot, the remaining tickets went on general sale on 22 February, though the India vs Pakistan fixture's tickets obviously did not last that long, and were oversubscribed more than 200 times in a mad frenzy.
